Something I have been dwelling on...

"Based on Psalm 91, a prayer of protection, with a bridge from Isaiah 54:17, the title track, “Dwell,” is one of the defining moments on the record, Aaron says. “Our personal worship, our willingness to abide or dwell in the shelter of the Lord, it’s so connected to God moving on our behalf, moving for us, to the Kingdom of God advancing around us. It’s about more than we can see with our eyes. You can see several pictures in the Old Testament over and over again, where the worshipers go out and then everything changes. That dwelling in the presence of the Lord is so critical to everything. The enemy can throw things at us, he can even take our lives, but he cannot prosper... we will ultimately triumph. And it’s all wrapped up in our willingness to wait on the Lord. As we wait, he wars for his people. As we abide, he acts. As we rest, he moves, he shows up.”

Sight Words

A sight word activity from Reading Made Easy

This year I am introducing sight words in a more direct way. Though we have always encountered sight words in our phonics lessons and more now that we are reading, I have waited until now to focus on them. There are many games out there for learning sight words but we like these games:

Erudition: The object of this game is to move your pawn through the streets and be the first one to the library at the end. To advance along the spaces the players roll the dice and move that nimber o spaces. Then the player will selct a card from one of the four piles. If the card is read correctly the player gets a bonus roll. The crads are divided into four levels. Letter and phongram sounds (blue cards), beginner sight words (green cards), intermediate level sight words (yellow) , and finally advanced level sight words (red).

Along the street there are fun things that deter the players or advance them forward.

Another good reveiw of this game by half dozen mama.

Sight Word Bingo: We are using a set of cards we got form our Sonlight, but there are many free resources out there.

Mrs. Perkin's Dolch Words

Bingo Card Creator

Sight Word Bingo FREE Download


Sight Word Go fish:

Sight Words Kindergarten by The Smiling Teacher has cards ready made to print. She has designed go fish cards, concentration cards, domino cards and more. They are color coded to their level and easy to use. We are using the go fish cards we have from Son light.

Make your own with unlined 3 X 5 cards.

There are many ideas out there and many you can do yourself without spending alot of money. Here is another website with more ideas for learning sight words. Top ten sight word games.

Sand Dough Maps

As promised, by me to the boys, we made sand dough maps of Egypt after doing the map flip book. When we did the flip book the upside down terminology became apparent to the boys and they were confused by upper Egypt being in the south and lower Egypt being in the north. By making the sand dough map we were able to see that up, and down meant elevation not north and south. And that the rains fell upon the mountains in the south and flowed into the Nile river and down towards the Mediterranean sea.

 Before doing this project I was only familiar with salt dough maps, but I found a recipe for making sand dough which I thought would make the sand desert on our maps more realistic. The sand we used was fine and dark, it would be fun to use a coarser sand that is lighter in color. The dough comes out more rubbery than usual salt dough but it worked fine for our maps.

Once we had the sand dough made, we smooshed the dough onto the cardboard using the print out of a topographical map of Egypt to guide us. The dough has glue in it so it dried very quickly we had to work fast to stay ahead of the drying.

Zak is making a last minute check of the map before he finishes his map.

It took a day or so for the map to dry. Once it was dry we painted it. TJ has just mixed a nice brown for the sand. Once he finishes that it will dry before we add the green parts just on the edge of the Nile River.

Waaala! The project is finished. TJ's map is on the left followed by Zak's map and finally Max's map.